The recipe of love

by Laura De Cesare

December has started. Lights on the streets were turned on and my grandmother was in turmoil to understand what to cook for Christmas.

During the first week of December a call arrived: “At 3pm meet me at home, we have to decide together Christmas food”. All the female part of the family was checking in, sitting on a table to make a brainstorming about the special menu for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and St. Stephen’s Day (a Catholic festivity, celebrated in Italy on the 26th of December).

Lasagne, spaghetti, clams, vegetables and pork. White wine, red wine, Fanta, Coca-Cola and water. Everything was marked to be prepared to buy everything.

However, the main character of this meeting were traditional sweets. Mostaccioli, Taralli stuffed with grape marmalade and fried Scrippelle were on the schedule. They are typical dishes of my region in Italy, handed down generation after generation, with the secrets on how to make them delicious.

My grandmother used to have all the recipes in a little notebook, yellowed caused by the time and with a lot of leaflets inside, because she liked to collect delicacies for special events or just for the afternoon coffee in company.

The anxiety for preparing them started around the 15th of December, moment when my grandma, my mother, my aunt, my female cousin and me were around the table, this time for another meeting: baking sweets.

You grab the flour, you start to mix sugar with eggs and you put the chocolate in a bain-marie”, commanded my grandmother.

“The kitchen was a mess: flour everywhere, sugar on the floor, loud screaming and laughing, but one thing was in the right place, our love. ”

Yes, because it was our moment to stay together, the only moment when we could talk about what was happening in our life, old stories about my grandma when she was child. It was a moment to confront, to reflect and to express.

This was going on for the whole afternoon: cooking, talking, trying if candies were good and preparing coffee for the break.

In reality one day was not enough, maybe two or three. All the same.

Kilos and kilos of sweets that didn’t fit in just one cupboard, so we used two or three rooms. Bed, dressers and bedside tables were covered by candies and no one could enter inside in order not to destroy our work by eating everything.

Two days before Christmas, the division of the sweets started. A little part for the family and the others for friends and neighbours. Baskets and trays were decorated with rosettes and bows, because the presents had to be perfect, not only for the taste but also for the eyesight.

Day by day, the excitement grown and in the early hour of the Christmas Eve’s morning, my grandmother was already in the kitchen preparing dishes for the dinner. All day she was there, mixing and cooking without eating, because the tradition says that you couldn’t.

With dedication and care, she prepared everything for us, waiting until 8pm to start the dinner. The table was set up with the typical Christmassy tablecloth and we were all together sitting on the table starting with the aperitif (Campari and Prosecco) and continuing with starters, first and second course, coffee, Amaro and the famous candies.

“For three days the dining table became a “war zone”, but the most important thing was that in this “war” we were together.”

Since when my grandmother passed away, we continue to carry on the traditions she transmitted without missing nothing, especially the love for sharing and conviviality.